Editor’s Note: The first in a three-part series on the audacious heightening of ambition in CSU athletics.

FORT COLLINS — Tony Frank knows a lot about a sports fan’s frustration. The Colorado State University president has been a Chicago Cubs fan all his life. A picture of Wrigley Field is on his office wall, and he seems to remember 1969 — when he was in elementary school — more for the Cubs’ late-season collapse than Richard Nixon’s inauguration, Woodstock or the moon landing.

In the past year, Frank has overseen a massive overhaul in the Rams’ athletic department. He was dissatisfied with the department’s direction, and also increasingly determined to use sports to help raise the university’s national profile. The move comes at a time when national league realignment has significantly weakened CSU’s conference, the Mountain West, making the highest priority — football prominence — even more of a challenge.

In the wake of a Stadium Advisory Committee’s report last week that the controversial project is feasible, Frank said he will announce by early October his recommendation to the school’s board about whether CSU should move forward with construction of a 42,000-seat, on-campus stadium. The new facility would replace the 32,500-seat, off-campus Hughes Stadium as the Rams’ game-day home starting with the 2015 season.

Estimated cost: $246 million for the core project, planned for the south side of the campus. The SAC, headed by athletic director Jack Graham and school vice president Amy Parsons, said it had “roughly estimated” another $51 million in costs if previously cited features were included, including an alumni center, parking facilities and other buildings.

Frank was so impressed with the ambition of Graham, a former CSU quarterback and retired businessman who late last year proposed the stadium project and volunteered to be the lead fundraiser, that he fired respected athletic director Paul Kowalczyk and installed Graham as his replacement.

Commitment to excellence

Now Graham is hopeful of not only witnessing the Rams’ move into a new stadium, but eventually a buildup of the athletic department budget — from the $23.5 million 2011-12 budget he inherited, to a planned $28.45 million in 2012-13, and to around $55 million a year at some point.

“The rest of this campus knows what excellence looks like,” Graham said in his office at the Fum McGraw Athletic Center. “You go to our veterinary school, our agriculture school, our college of business. They don’t settle for mediocrity. That is not what the culture’s been like in our athletic department the last 10 years. … I did not come here to babysit mediocrity. We’re going to drive athletics to a level of excellence that reflects the standards of the rest of the university.”

In December, soon after he was hired, Graham fired football coach Steve Fairchild and oversaw the hiring of Jim McElwain, coming off a national championship as Alabama’s offensive coordinator. McElwain will make what for CSU is an eye-popping $1.3 million annually.

Fairchild’s annual package income was $700,000, and when he was fired, he was owed 350,000. Kowalczyk’s contract ran until 2015, and he was owed approximately $830,000. The university emphasized that the money for the buyouts would come from existing funds in several unrestricted CSU Foundation gift accounts.

“Great coaches don’t grow on trees and the great ones out there want to get paid well,” Graham said. “We found a great coach.”

Said McElwain: “We’re going to match the excellence of the university. We’re going to match the excellence of this president. I’ve been put in a role to facilitate that. I don’t think it gets any more exciting than that.”

When men’s basketball coach Tim Miles left for Nebraska after the 2011-12 season, the Rams hired Larry Eustachy — prominent both for his success and alcohol problems while coaching at Iowa State before turning his life around — to step into the breach. His annual base salary is $500,000, and he can earn another $250,000 through what seem to be reachable incentives.

Those figures represent about a push with what Miles was making, since his base salary when he left was $585,000, due to be bumped to $750,000 on July 1.

Other changes in Graham’s first few months included replacing women’s basketball coach Kristen Holt with Ryun Williams.

Priorities in order

CSU’s president considers success in sports, especially in football and basketball, a crucial component in his drive to attract more out-of-state students in order to combat the dwindling of state funding for higher education in Colorado. Frank bristles when he hears a hint that this is the product of an otherwise sane doctor of veterinary medicine allowing his affinity for sports to cloud his judgment.

Among other things, he points out that a recently completed Campaign for Colorado State raised $537 million and that $63 million of that was for scholarships; and it would lead to 16 new endowed chairs or professorships.

“I have to admit I have to work to not get a little frustrated with the priorities argument, because athletic spending at CSU is around 3 percent of our total budget,” Frank said in his office, a short walk from the proposed stadium site. “Athletics are incredibly visible for universities. But I also think people shouldn’t allow that level of visibility to confuse where universities put their priorities.

“This university has some incredibly strong academic programs, way stronger than they ought to be given the funding base behind them. They didn’t get there by going, ‘Ah, we don’t have as much funding as we ought to in microbiology, so we’re not going to be very good.’ They got good because they had a relentless focus on excellence. And I don’t know if that’s always the way CSU athletics has looked at itself.”

The most attention-getting parts of this attempted athletics upgrade are the stadium project and the financial commitment in hiring McElwain and paying significantly more for assistant football coaches. Is paying a football coach that much money economically justifiable?

“I hope so,” Frank said, and then chuckled. “If it’s not,” he added, “whomever you interview in this office in two years will tell you what an idiot I was.”

While he was talking specifically about McElwain, that answer probably could have worked for virtually anything involved in Frank’s overseeing of his school’s new athletic direction.

It is risky and it is audacious.

Or worse.

So why do it?

Money matters

Frank can rattle off stunning numbers about the increases in tuition at public universities over the past few decades, a result of both inflation and a precipitous percentage drop in state support, which traditionally subsidized much of the costs for in-state students. “Over that period, we’ve essentially been privatizing American public higher education,” he said.

If the trend continues, Frank said, state support could completely dry up in the next 20 years. He views his mission as positioning CSU — which has an enrollment of about 27,000 — to withstand that. One move, of course, would be to continue with major tuition hikes, but he speculates that it would require a doubling of in-state tuition to make up for the lost state money. He also scoffs at trying to make up the money through volume, such as increasing enrollment to 63,000. “That doesn’t work for CSU; that doesn’t work for this community,” he said.

A more palatable alternative, he said, is to draw more students paying out-of-state tuition. And higher-profile sports teams, he believes, would draw more national attention to CSU, including from potential nonresident students. “Adding 4,000 nonresident students is $80 million,” he said.

That’s where the on-campus stadium comes into play, with the country seeing — and the fans attending the games getting — a better feel for the campus itself than if games continue to play be played at Hughes Stadium, which opened in 1968 along the foothills to the west of campus. Frank said a realistic goal could be to add 2,000 to 3,000 in-state students, while pursuing even harder additional out-of-state students.

“The carrying capacity of this campus is somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000,” he said. “You’ve got plenty of room for nonresident growth that maintains the character of the campus.”

Bottom line: Frank argues that increased sports visibility would literally pay off at the registrar’s office. He cited what happens when prospective out-of-state students and their parents visit CSU and take the campus tour in the school’s “Yellowstone-style” buses.

“Our focus groups tell us that when the tours are done, the parents are thinking, ‘This is a great educational value, I hope Jamie wants to go to school here,’ ” Frank said. “And the kids are thinking, ‘This is a really great place to go to school, I hope I can talk mom and dad into it.’

“So our yield rates once we get them on campus are really good. Our yield rates once they ask us to send them (information) are pretty good. When we don’t succeed is at that moment where a 17-year-old kid is sitting with the SAT or ACT, and going, ‘Where do I want to send my scores?’ They don’t think of us.”

A graduate of Wheat Ridge High School and the University of Colorado, Terry Frei has been named a state's sportswriter of the year six times -- three times each in Oregon and Colorado. He mainly covers college football and hockey for The Post. He's the author of seven books, including the novel "Olympic Affair" about Colorado's Glenn Morris, the 1936 Olympic decathlon champion.

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